God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [162]
Despite the difficulties, both sides saw the need for regional military organizations. The royalists attempted to create associations and Parliament launched a number through 1643, in a rather uncoordinated way. Confused and ad hoc measures layered associations on one another as each ordinance failed to repeal previous measures. As a result some counties were formally associated in different ways – Shropshire, the most extreme example, was in five different associations in six months. More coherence was emerging by 1644, but there were two features of these early measures: their lack of coherence and suspicion at the county level of the new regional committees. Even in East Anglia – according to popular legend a hotbed of Puritan enthusiasm for the parliamentary cause – these measures required careful handling and caused considerable friction.15
Military measures on the parliamentary side were imposed by the power of ordinances, and some of the people who had held their noses during the crisis following the attempt on the Five Members might now be more uneasy about the long-term implications of these innovations. During February and March a loan was raised and repaid to set the navy to sea, and an ordinance passed to find sailors to man the ships.16 On 7 March the Lord Mayor and citizens of London were given the necessary powers to fortify London, allowing them to trench, stop and fortify the highways leading into the City, and to raise a local rate to pay for the work. In next to no time, in the light of the obvious military threat through the spring and summer of 1643, London was turned into a fortress. Towns elsewhere felt vulnerable – obvious targets of military action and not easily defensible – so co-operation with this project was not in itself a measure of allegiance to the parliamentary cause. If the royalists came, they would not necessarily be careful to damage only the property of committed parliamentarians. Surely one of the largest public construction projects in early modern England, the construction of London’s defences was turned into a moment of civic celebration, at least if some observers were to be believed.17 Not all the massive burdens being imposed by the war were met with such enthusiasm: not all had such an obvious and necessary function.
The most powerful demonstration of the potential of ordinances, however, was the creation of an elaborate and productive financial apparatus. In late February, Parliament had imposed a national tax, the Weekly Assessment, on the authority of an ordinance. It was a measure of fearful power, successfully circumventing the problem of local evasion which had drawn the teeth of the main parliamentary tax before 1640, the subsidy. Faced with a demand for a parliamentary subsidy local assessors had winked at or actively supported under-assessment at a staggering level, an administrative weakness which rendered the tax increasingly inadequate to the needs of the crown. In Norfolk, for example, the value of an individual subsidy had fallen by 70 per cent between 1590 and 1630, a crippling loss in a period of inflation, and this was not untypical. The assessment avoided this problem by imposing a fixed sum on the whole country, stipulating how much was to be raised in each county and borough. Local assessors then divided this burden – this system retained local discretion about relative liabilities, but not the power to determine the overall yield. The yields were phenomenal by pre-war standards. Hunstanton, Norfolk, had paid £5 18s for the subsidy of 1626. In 1640 the subsidies cost £10 12s and the poll tax £58 2s 6d. In the twelve months to December 1643 it paid £138 12s. In Hanworth,